Exploring the history of album tributes and their resurgence
It is one of the most profound, and occasionally controversial, gestures of respect from one musical act to another – covering not just a favourite number, but an entire album. The latest comes from Death Cab For Cutie bandleader Ben Gibbard, who has delved back to his formative teen years by taking on Teenage Fanclub’s acclaimed 1991 release Bandwagonesque.
It follows in the wake of a more tangential tribute, British jazz artist Django Bates’s collaboration with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band to mark the 50th anniversary of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The appearance of both projects suggest a revival of the whole-album tribute after the wrong turn that was Ryan Adams’s quickfire homage to Taylor Swift’s 1989.
Then again, the track-by-track tribute has always had a chequered history. One of the earliest and least impressive attempts comes from Booker T and The MGs’ horribly bland appraisal of the Fab Fours’ Abbey Road. The Stax studio band are best known for such tight grooves as “Green Onions” and playing behind the likes of Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. Their cover album McLemore Avenue, though, is a limp, essentially easy listening, effort that pales in comparison to more committed soulful takes, namely Nina Simone’s “Here Comes The Sun” and The Supremes’ cool “Come Together.”
The concept only began to take off in the early Noughties, thanks partly to the genius of New York-based reggae outfit The Easy Star All Stars, who have recorded some of the most accomplished and inspired cover albums. They hit the ground running in 2003 with the Pink Floyd tribute Dub Side Of The Moon, which includes such witty touches as the sound of a bong in use to introduce “Money”. The collective followed that up with regular three-year instalments: first came Radiodread, a spacious tip of the hat to Radiohead’s OK Computer, before Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band and Thrillah—a Jamaican-infused take on Michael Jackson’s world sales-record album.
Three years ago, Wayne Coyne’e colourful outfit gathered a disparate group of collaborators for the inevitable With A Little Help From My Fwends, a Sgt Pepper’s rerub notable for highlighting his unlikely friendship with Miley Cyrus, beguiling on “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”.
Often, such projects appear as limited-runs, tying in with such initiatives as Record Store Day, suggesting one reason cover albums may have caught on. The interest in celebrating classic long players coincides with a threatened place for the form, barged out by streaming and playlists. The most successful, but also most lambasted, album tribute came in 2015 when Adams dropped his version of Swift’s mammoth 1989, itself released the year before. The prolific Americana artist’s vulnerable takes on “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off” were greeted as revelatory, his album actually charting just ahead of the original, then still in the Billboard parade 40-odd weeks after its release. Then came the backlash, one directed as much at male critics who seemingly used Adams’s authenticity to poo-poo Swift’s pop veneer. Shocked at what he saw as gross misrepresentation (he is a big Swift fan and her breakup tunes hit home as he was going through divorce himself), the male performer pledged never to cover an album ever again, though other examples continue to come thick and fast.
Gibbard by contrast, chooses to stay relatively faithful, while providing the additional gloss of his regular band’s richly textured musicality.
“Last year there was a trend of musical heroes dying, both expectedly and unexpectedly; I think there’s a connection,” he says. “The artists that were able to build enormous audiences before the fragmenting effects of YouTube and Soundcloud are reaching the end of their time on Earth, or the end of their artistic productivity. I don’t think there is the possibility for any emerging artist to become a Bowie, Elvis or Prince.” More alarmingly, he also cites the number of times Ed Sheeran— among others—has been accused of plagiarism. Could current artists be running out of the space to be original, he muses.
“Pop music continues to be nearly all in 4/4 [time] and to limit itself to eight or fewer pitches of a diatonic scale. So people working in that world are running out of pleasing possibilities,” he suggests. To be fair, Adams, bounced back from the 1989 farrago with his own well-received break-up album Prisoner, but despite his experiences, the attraction of the classic album seems yet to have reached its limit. THE INDEPENDENT
The concept of paying these tributes began in the early Noughties, thanks partly to the genius of New Yorkbased The Easy Star All Stars, for their inspired cover albums.